As I predicted a few weeks back, this topic appears to be a growing concern (at least in certain key urban media markets): “why are men so juvenile and why won’t they settle down?”
First up is Mark Regnerus:
We keep hearing that young men are failing to adapt to contemporary life. Their financial prospects are impaired — earnings for 25- to 34-year-old men have fallen by 20 percent since 1971. Their college enrollment numbers trail women’s: Only 43 percent of American undergraduates today are men. Last year, women made up the majority of the work force for the first time. And yet there is one area in which men are very much in charge: premarital heterosexual relationships.
First, it’s not at all a bad thing that women are catching up and in some cases surpassing their male classmates. Along with the good, however, are some wrenching changes to the society in which this change is taking place — especially to sexual relationships:
When attractive women will still bed you, life for young men, even those who are floundering, just isn’t so bad. This isn’t to say that all men direct the course of their relationships. Plenty don’t. But what many young men wish for — access to sex without too many complications or commitments — carries the day. If women were more fully in charge of how their relationships transpired, we’d be seeing, on average, more impressive wooing efforts, longer relationships, fewer premarital sexual partners, shorter cohabitations, and more marrying going on. Instead, according to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (which collects data well into adulthood), none of these things is occurring. Not one. The terms of contemporary sexual relationships favor men and what they want in relationships, not just despite the fact that what they have to offer has diminished, but in part because of it. And it’s all thanks to supply and demand.
It’s not just raw numbers: the sexual balance hasn’t been significantly changed just because of the shift in the proportion of men and women going on to higher education. What has been impacted is something that doesn’t yield readily to slogans or seminars: women have strong preferences for men of higher status than themselves. This isn’t a social preference that can be talked around: it has much more to do with biology.
Women prefer to “date up” or “marry up”, and the pool of males that fit that criteria is getting smaller (fewer men are going on to university). This forces women to compete for the limited number of alpha males: instead of being pursued by eager men, (some) men are now being pursued by many women. Resulting, at least for that group of men, in copious supplies of women willing to exchange sex for attention.
Kay S. Hymowitz sees the extended adolescence for men as a new stage of life, pre-adulthood:
So where did these pre-adults come from? You might assume that their appearance is a result of spoiled 24-year-olds trying to prolong the campus drinking and hook-up scene while exploiting the largesse of mom and dad. But the causes run deeper than that. Beginning in the 1980s, the economic advantage of higher education — the “college premium” — began to increase dramatically. Between 1960 and 2000, the percentage of younger adults enrolled in college or graduate school more than doubled. In the “knowledge economy,” good jobs go to those with degrees. And degrees take years.
[. . .]
In his disregard for domestic life, the playboy was prologue for today’s pre-adult male. Unlike the playboy with his jazz and art-filled pad, however, our boy rebel is a creature of the animal house. In the 1990s, Maxim, the rude, lewd and hugely popular “lad” magazine arrived from England. Its philosophy and tone were so juvenile, so entirely undomesticated, that it made Playboy look like Camus.
At the same time, young men were tuning in to cable channels like Comedy Central, the Cartoon Network and Spike, whose shows reflected the adolescent male preferences of its targeted male audiences. They watched movies with overgrown boy actors like Steve Carell, Luke and Owen Wilson, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Will Farrell and Seth Rogen, cheering their awesome car crashes, fart jokes, breast and crotch shots, beer pong competitions and other frat-boy pranks. Americans had always struck foreigners as youthful, even childlike, in their energy and optimism. But this was too much.
Given all of that, is it any surprise that fewer men are willing to exchange their pre-adult lifestyle with all its juvenile attraction combined with the adult trappings (cars, booze, drugs, etc.) for the “real” adult lifestyle?
Single men have never been civilization’s most responsible actors; they continue to be more troubled and less successful than men who deliberately choose to become husbands and fathers. So we can be disgusted if some of them continue to live in rooms decorated with “Star Wars” posters and crushed beer cans and to treat women like disposable estrogen toys, but we shouldn’t be surprised.
Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven — and often does. Women put up with him for a while, but then in fear and disgust either give up on any idea of a husband and kids or just go to a sperm bank and get the DNA without the troublesome man. But these rational choices on the part of women only serve to legitimize men’s attachment to the sand box. Why should they grow up? No one needs them anyway. There’s nothing they have to do.
Over at Ace of Spades HQ, the Regnerus article got Ace thinking:
A related thought I’ve had concerns feminists’ religious doctrine that social restraints on sexual behavior is all caused by grubby, oppressive, vagina-shackling men. This doesn’t make sense at all, and never has made sense, and is an unchallenged meme in the Grrls Rule, Boys Drool leftist feminist culture not because it makes a lick of sense but only because it hangs all the evils of the world on the Designated Sexual Villains in the feminist morality play. Men, of course.
If one accepts the hard-to-dispute premise that, between the sexes, women prefer a higher-sexual-cost regime in which men are supposed to “work for it,” as it were, and men prefer a lower-sexual-cost regime in which their sexual needs can be gratified with almost no work whatsoever (compare and contrast female wish-fulfillment romcoms with male wish-fulfillment pornos, or even James Bond movies, actually), then of course it makes sense that women, rather than men, have a sound motive for increasing the sexual penalties for promiscuous sex whereas men have stronger motive for decreasing them.
[. . .]
Leftist feminists of the younger, sillier generation similarly attempt to claim that it is evil, controlling men who use the word whore to not merely brand actual prostitutes but to control the sexual expressions of everyday women. That is, they assert (and these extremely silly third-generation feminists seem to write about little else but this) feel that social disapproval of female promiscuity is almost entirely a male invention, because men, you see, want to keep women from having sex with other men, so we invent the usage of the word “whore” to describe a sexually-liberated woman and by infecting the culture with this disease of whore-branding, make sexually-promiscuous women feel badly about their sexual choices and force them to conform to a male, Christian-fundamentalist (of course) regime of female chastity.
To the extent that women participate in this oppressive regime of whore-deeming, it’s only because a false conscience has been imposed upon them by male-dominated media. Women call other women “whores” not because women wish to wound other women (their sexual competition) but because men have hypnotized them to think this way.
To control their scary vaginas.
It nicely illustrates the confusion brought on by the social and sexual mores in flux:
As has been noted many, many times (not that lefty feminists ever notice), we did in fact have a Sexual Revolution, and men won. And the strangest thing about this is that lefty feminists, while claiming (and falsely believing) themselves to be liberating women, have in fact been eagerly liberating men, liberating men from the need of offering any kind of satisfactory trade-in-kind to women for sexual favors.
In their strange inversion of reality, it’s men who have the means, motive, and opportunity to increase the costs of obtaining sex and it’s women, on the other hand, who have the strong interest in a promiscuity and commitment-free (or even dinner-date free) sex.
And men, who, in this role-reversed alternate reality feminists have concocted, desperately want women to keep their vaginas chaste, can only be “beaten” by giving it all away for free.
And of course keeping abortion not only legal but socially praiseworthy because, again in this comic-book “What If?” issue of reality feminists have concocted, men only want to have sex to produce children and women, of course, are far less game for procreation, viewing sex as primarily a vehicle for erotic gratification. But that’s a dementia for another day.
Also interested enough to comment on the article was Monty:
. . . this cultural trend has left many men unsure about their place in the new order of things. The traditional role as primary breadwinner and head of the household has been removed, but nothing has come along to replace it. The predominantly-liberal media and entertainment complexes have spent decades denigrating men as hapless buffoons or abusive troglodytes. Modern Hollywood heart-throbs are not square-jawed heroes in the Gary Cooper mode, but rather thin, indolent, androgynous, and (most importantly) non-threatening. And while some women often wonder out loud “Where are all the decent men?”, there’s plenty of evidence at hand that given a choice, they’re still more attracted to the moneyed jerks of the world.
Monty also points out that there’s not just a strong set of hedonistic reasons pushing young men to stay in that “pre-adult” stage of life:
The big problem with modern heterosexual relationships is that apart from the sex, there’s really not much in it for men any more. Men have few legal rights over their own progeny; family law for decades has whittled away a man’s parental rights to little more than a financial obligation. If the woman already has children from a previous marriage, the man incurs an enormous burden in return for very little gain: in most cases he has no parental rights over the children, he competes for his wife’s time with the ex (and the ex’s family), and he incurs huge financial burdens but gains very little actual power in the household. A man’s sexual life is viewed with suspicion and sometimes disgust by women, who seem to want to train a man’s sex drive in the same way they train a naughty dog. A man alone with a small child is a man always on the verge of being accused as a child molester or abuser — society has made single men afraid to even approach children who are not their own (and sometimes even when the children are their own).
In short, men have been systematically demoted from their traditional place in society. This is good because it has given many women far richer and more interesting lives; but very bad because it has given men nothing in recompense. Women retained many of their old power-centers (child-rearing, home-making, etc.) but gained a lot of new power as well. For men, most of the change has been on the negative side of the ledger. From the male viewpoint, the only positive aspect of the change is that it’s much easier to have uncommitted sex, and even here the long-term harm far outweighs any short-term gains.
Men play video games, and watch sports, and hang out with their friends, because they enjoy it. It’s no more an “adolescent” activity for men than, say, shopping with their girlfriends is for women. Men do have complicated inner lives. They have hopes and dreams of their own that are not necessarily connected to the women they may be seeing. Men desire comfort and happiness in their lives no less than women do, but they seek it in different ways. Marriage — even a long-term relationship — has to benefit both partners, and in recent decades many men have simply found it to be not worthwhile.
Jon, who brought the original link to my attention, had this to say about the phenomenon:
How pervasive is this issue? I think the feminization of males is mostly a “big urban” thing, rather than universal. The closer you are to a dense urban centre, the more hipsters and girly males you seem to get. There seems to be an inverse square law happing here — the further away you get from the dense urban core, the fewer pansies you seem to find. Media and academics would have us believe that the fem-men in rural areas are simply closeted and are hiding their softer sides out of fear, but of course they would say that: they cannot conceive of the possibility that anyone outside of their own social environment might actually be different.
